Ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou sentenced for leaking name on agency's use of torture.....

ALEXANDRIA, VA. A former CIA officer was sentenced Friday to more than two years in prison by a federal judge who rejected arguments that he was acting as a whistleblower on the agency's use of torture when he leaked a covert officer's name to a reporter.

A plea deal required the judge to impose a sentence of 2 1/2 years. U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said she would have given John Kiriakou much more time if she could.

Kiriakou's supporters describe him as a whistleblower who exposed aspects of the CIA's use of torture against detained terrorists. Prosecutors said he was merely seeking to increase his fame by trading on his insider knowledge.

Kiriakou's 2007 interviews about the interrogations of al-Qaida terrorist Abu Zubaydah were among the first by a CIA insider confirming reports that several detainees had been waterboarded.

9. This was the Valerie Plame guy?

10. Yep....along with Libby and Rove. It's interesting that Plame's group tracked the global....

....movement of radioactive materials and the equipment associated with those materials. When her group was publicly compromised, the CIA was effectively blinded when it came to tracking nuclear materials.

It's doubly interesting to note that the Bush Administration was also engaged in killing the credibility of the UN observers assigned to finding out what the Iraqis were doing with their nuclear program.

Just a short while later, Colin Powell was sent to the UN to give a rambling, nearly incoherent speech about Iraq's WMD capabilities, and there was nobody remaining with any credibility to say it was untrue.

Covertly taken photos of CIA interrogators that were shown by defense attorneys to al Qaeda inmates at the Guantanamo Bay prison represent a more serious security breach than the 2003 outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame, the agency’s former general counsel said Wednesday.

John Rizzo, who was the agency’s top attorney until December, said in an interview that he initially requested the Justice Department and CIA investigation into the compromise of CIA interrogators’ identities after photographs of the officers were found in the cell of one al Qaeda terrorist in Cuba.

“Well I think this is far more serious than Valerie Plame,” Mr. Rizzo said after a breakfast speech. “That was clearly illegal, outing a covert officer. I am not downplaying that. But this is far more serious.”

“This was not leaked to a columnist,” he added. “These were pictures of undercover people who were involved in the interrogations program given for identification purposes to the 9/11 (terrorists).”